I have a love-hate relationship with Pokemon. I am demonstrably not the target demographic. As a certified 90s kid, I’ve long outlived my usefulness to the awesome and terrifying intellectual property that is Pokemon. I have no strong attachment to anything post-2004 and I think the series has kinda sucked for a good while now. That said, I still have a soft spot for the old stuff. I don’t have any desire to try a new title and see how they’re justifying giving Charizard yet another new evolution, but I can fuck up some Johto. But above all, I’ve always found that Pokemon is at its best when the developers can let loose in a spin-off title. Gimmie a Snap or Mystery Dungeon any day of the week and I’ll be happy as a clam. But one of the games that I have the strongest memory of is Pokemon Colosseum.
For Pokemon Colosseum, the folks at Nintendo and The Pokemon Company wanted something fresh for their first outing on the Gamecube. They ended up launching a start-up studio called Genius Sonority, which was fully dedicated to Pokemon titles for their first few years. Led by studio head and Enix expat Manabu Tamana, this team had experience in the RPG genre but was largely unfamiliar with Pokemon or its conventions. Deciding to establish a tone and setting aimed at teens instead of the children the mainline games targeted, development on Pokemon Colosseum ended with its release in November of 2003 in Japan. The following March, the game was released to North America and was received very warmly by the vast majority of critics and fans. But Father Time is undefeated and the RPG genre has grown by leaps and bounds since 2003. Is this game still worth playing in the post-apocalyptic future of 2025?
Gotta Catch ‘Em All
Pokemon Colosseum is a game with a beginning tailor-made to create a lasting impression in seven-year-old boys. The story begins with some lingering shots showing the desert base of criminal organization, Team Snatchem. People are shown milling about, the boss is happy in his office, and everything’s all good. But suddenly, explosions. We get a few reaction shots, goons are running around, chaos ensues, no one knows what’s going on. Silhouetted against the desert sun peering in, a man in sunglasses and a sick jacket emerges from a smoking hole in the wall and grabs a piece of equipment before escaping. Waiting for him outside is his trusty motorcycle and his two Pokemon companions. As he revs up and takes away, the rest of Team Snagem tries to chase after him before ultimately giving up, panting and wondering what’s just happened. But, as one last act of defiance, the sunglasses motorcycle man flips a switch, triggering one last explosion that takes care of the base and sends the creeps outside flying on their asses. As he rides away, he flashes a devilish smile to the camera. End scene. Print it. Are you kidding me? Get me his action figure now.
You take control of the sunglasses man, who you can name yourself but has a default name of Wes. You sort of meander around until you meet some goons hauling around a burlap sack full of girl. After beating them, you rescue the girl, who can also name yourself but the game insists on Rui. You learn that she was being kidnapped because she can see “Shadow Pokemon,” who are Pokemon that have had their hearts artificially closed so they become more powerful. It turns out that ordinary people can’t tell the difference and, unlike regular Pokemon, these guys aren’t afraid to attack humans. So the shadowy organization known as Cipher wants to keep creating these Shadow Pokemon, get Rui out of the picture, and hopefully take over the world. From here, you sort of fall into the task of stopping Cipher and rescuing the Shadow Pokemon. Which, hey, all of that sounds like a pretty good premise. The issue comes from how the game follows it up.
It’s a good thing that that opening cinematic is so memorable, because not much else about the game’s story is. Before returning to this title, I always thought that this was the Pokemon game with plot. I would always remember it as “the good one” because there was more to it than just going around to gyms. But the plot is the definition of boilerplate. There is no interesting dialogue. Even calling it dialogue is a stretch. You walk into characters and they exposition at you, then you take their information and walk into other characters. The experience is so streamlined that you don’t even notice how strange it is that Wes is a silent protagonist in situations that would ordinarily need some conviction or opinions. The concept of dramatic tension is absent from Pokemon Colosseum. You just move from location to location, doing the thing you were gonna do with no twists or resistance along the way. Well, I mean, you need to open a gate one time, so there, you got me, Pokefreaks. While there are a few standout characters you meet, they’re usually only memorable because of a gimmick in their design. I love Miror B, but one character (with an admittedly awesome theme song) does not a good cast make. Everyone else has pretty interchangeable personalities and don’t stand out. Show me one Silva fan and I’ll show you a liar. All that being said though, when compared against the likes of the mainline games, this is still a story and cast that are trying to do something. And it might be a bad argument, but I think that being the Pokemon game that tries entitles Colosseum to a little bit of leeway. It’s not high art. I’m not even sure about medium art. But the story on offer here is more than the bottom of the barrel. And for that, it already sweeps the rest of the mainline series.
You Wouldn’t Download a Pikachu
If you’re familiar with Pokemon, then you know the gameplay on tap here. We’ve got a turn-based RPG dish, so selecting words from other words is what’s on the menu. You have a legion of marketable monsters at your beck and call, then you sick them on other monsters. It’s a simple formula, but it works. However, Colosseum has two unique gimmicks that set it apart from its core games; for one, we’re doing double battles. Every single battle in the game takes place as a two-on-two. And to be honest, it’s the best decision Genius Sonority could have made. Pokemon as a series has always been accused of being pretty easy and mindless. So, making it so you have to deal with two opponents at once while they try to coordinate attacks and strategies to outplay you is a whole different experience. A lot of the early battles are still pretty piss-baby easy, but in the later hours of the game, you regularly run into pretty dangerous combinations that force you to actually think instead of just slamming everything you see with Confusion. As for the second gimmick, we have to talk about how you actually capture new Pokemon.
While the rest of the series lets you go crazy filling up your pockets with little dudes, in Colosseum, you don’t actually catch too many Pokemon. In fact, you can’t even go and grab them whenever the mood strikes you. No, it turns out that that piece of equipment you stole from the Team Snatchem base is actually a portable Snag Machine, a weird-looking sleeve that allows you to throw out Poke Balls to capture another trainer’s Pokemon. But you’re a good guy, so you’re not just stealing any old Pokemon. Specifically, you can only capture Shadow Pokemon. Easy enough, right? Just grab the ones that are giving off the evil fart gas. Well, unfortunately, this is only the beginning. After stealing the Shadow Pokemon, you’re essentially given a useless little guy who only knows one move. You have to continuously use them in battle, rub them down with fragrances, sing kumbaya with them, anything to turn them back into their good-natured selves. Only after that long process do you have another functional member of the team. It’s a pretty long process and you need to go through it for almost every Pokemon you add to the team. This paired with the fact that you need to constantly keep adding members to your team if you want any chance of dealing with annoying battles in the mid-to-late game means you need to do this exhausting process a lot. And although it’s a cool idea, it ends up being a slog in execution. Speaking of slogs…
Look, I consider myself an RPG fan. And Pokemon, at its core, is an RPG. But, between you and me, these kinds of games are always a little boring. You do the same thing repeatedly, selecting the same words from a list over and over until credits. But the things that usually make me fall in love with the games come from the wallpaper around the gameplay. I love a fun story, fun characters, fun locales. But most of all, I need some decent pacing. I need to have a break from the gameplay to explore a town or talk to some people, anything will do. But if you feed me into eight battles one after another, my eyes are gonna glaze and I’ll be reaching for a podcast to make my time go by faster. Oh, hey Pokemon Colosseum, funny running into you here. This is a pretty short game, all things considered, only taking about fifteen hours for the main game. But the time spent with it feels like it takes forever. With no interesting characters or set pieces to break up the constant battles, your enjoyment of this game really depends on how much you enjoy the core gameplay loop. And in those early hours when nothing is challenging you, you’re painfully aware of how many times you’ve pressed the A button in a row without any brain activity going on. The gameplay here is fun, don’t get me wrong. At its peak, it dwarfs the quality of the mainline titles. But everything being considered, the packaging around the game lets down the fun factor and even ends up souring me on the fun parts. This is definitely a game to play in small chunks if you want to retain your sanity.
Let The Music Play!
Visually, I think that Pokemon Colosseum is perfect. I think that this is the point where graphics should have stopped advancing and I pray every day for games to become uglier until we reach this quality again. And I am not biased because I’m right, so it’s just truth. From characters to the Pokemon themselves, models are clean but stylized enough that the designs pop. Not every character was given the most attention, but Genius Sonority really did work bringing that late-90s, early-00s anime look and fashion into 3D. The animation work might be minimal, but they do add impact to each battle beyond just watching your sprites on the handheld wiggle back and forth while numbers go down. If there’s one thing to criticize in this game, it would be the environments. In general, the locations in this game are serviceable and blocked well. There are some pretty cool places here and there’s a good amount of variety. But the environments end up being too efficient. There’s never too much fluff or unnecessary detail. And while that’s a commendable goal when it comes to saving resources, it can also lead to pretty basic-looking surroundings. Plainly speaking, a lot of the game world looks kinda boring. In battle, this problem is way bigger of an issue. I’m not sure what the rationale was, but these spaces are incredibly bare-bones, often just resembling empty warehouses. This was acceptable in the past, when the games were handheld or set entirely within stadiums in the case of the N64 games, but here, in this adventure spanning multiple locations and biomes, it sticks out as a negative. However, I don’t think this slight nitpick is enough to damn the rest of the visuals. The fact remains that this game looks perfect and nothing can change or diminish that fact. Just look at screenshots of this game if you don’t believe me, then come back. Yeah. Yeah, I thought so.
Music is one of the key cornerstones of the Pokemon franchise. Even the games that suck usually have a few fans grabbing a bop or two for their playlists. But, I’m going to be honest, going through this game, I had mixed feelings. There were a few tracks that stood out, but there were a lot more that just bounced off. But worse than that, they annoyed me. This confused me. If for no other reason than this being a game from my childhood. I mean, this game should have at least been saved by rose-tinted glasses. But no, as I went through the game, I came to terms with the fact that I just didn’t like this soundtrack very much. But then, while I was writing this piece up, I was listening to the soundtrack in the background. And I realized that, oh shit, this does bang. I think the issue came from how it was presented in-game. For one, this is a pretty short soundtrack, which leads to a lot of repetition through a fifteen-hour playthrough. And for the other, you would think that the standard battle theme is the only song in the game. Every song on the soundtrack is fighting for screentime against it due to the staggering number of battles that happen one after another. So, presentation aside, how is the music? It’s good, really good actually. Tsukasa Tawada had never composed for a Pokemon game before, so the offering here is unlike what you’ll find in the main games. If I had to describe it, I’d just call it a very uneven, but very fun bag. There are decisions that straight-up baffle me, but not in a bad way. I still have no idea why Phenac City’s theme bursts into a violin-driven romp out of nowhere before descending back into its piano-laden orchestral arrangement. No clue why the theme to the final dungeon is the most triumphant and jovial track in the entire game, sounding like Mario Party by way of Samba de Amigo. But even though there are some tracks that I feel don’t quite fit, they all stick in your head, whether you want to or not. Even the battle music, which I came to hate after listening to it for so long, is a pretty killer track. So while I don’t think the medium does it any favors, I think Pokemon Colosseum does in fact continue the proud Pokemon tradition of having a soundtrack better than the game it comes from.
Preparing For Trouble
Pokemon Colosseum surprised me with the additional story content on offer. Throughout the game, you’ll come across a bunch of optional challenges, from town stadiums to the monstrous Mt. Battle. There’s even a hidden boss that takes up residence in a dungeon once you kick the old boss out. While the rewards from these tasks aren’t usually too exciting, the opportunity to grind out battles is invaluable when going about bringing Shadow Pokemon back to their senses. And even though I think 100 battles is a crazy amount to complete Mt. Battle, I can’t hate on it since it’s optional in the first place. But beyond all that, what was even more surprising to me was the existence of a post-game. After beating the game, loading up the save presents you with a few more hours of story and battles. Not only can you go back and try to catch all the Shadow Pokemon that you missed the first time around, but you get whole new story beats and a fun little twist at the end of it. And while I can’t say the base story kept me on the edge of my seat, I think it’s fun to give this option to players who just want more out of their game. I appreciate the effort that went into the content on offer here, even if I don’t think that all of it is worth doing.
There’s also the Battle mode. This most closely resembles the older Pokemon Stadium games, though there are two modes available. You can either choose Colosseum Battle and take your team into several multi-battle challenges or Battle Now, which just throws you right into the thick of it to get your Pokemon fix. You can either bring your team from the main game to the Colosseum Battles or import your team from the GameBoy Advance titles, which is a neat addition. Battle Now gives you a preselected batch of Pokemon when you select your difficulty, which makes this mode more of a fun puzzle to use what you’re given instead of just bringing in the overpowered legendary you hacked into your copy of Ruby. You also get the neat choice of fighting double battles like the rest of the game or single battles, which are more in line with the mainline titles. I’m going to be honest here. These game modes are not exactly my thing, but I deeply respect that they give the option for this alongside a fully-fledged RPG. There’s a lot of bang for your buck in this package, which I’m sure I would be ecstatic about if I didn’t just have my mom buy this game for me 21 years ago. All in all, Pokemon Colosseum was a full title with the main game alone. With these modes added on though? This is a game that you can easily sink dozens of hours into.
Comfy and Easy To Wear
Pokemon Colosseum is one of those games that I can’t help but have affection for. It’s not one of the most fun games I’ve ever played, but I won’t count out the possibility that I’ll end up playing it again someday in the future. There are flaws. Giant, obvious flaws that bring the entire experience down. But there are just as many fun gameplay segments or quirky choices in the music that keep my attention. If you’re trying to decide if this game is for you, you really need to ask yourself: how do I feel about the Pokemon franchise? If you’re already a fan, it’s a no-brainer. This is, in my opinion, just an improvement on the regular Pokemon experience. But if you’re only a casual fan or just a fan of RPGs as a whole, this becomes a harder sell. There is magic in this disk, but putting yourself in the right mindset to appreciate it can be a task onto itself. Ultimately, I think that this game is worth playing, but whether or not it’s worth beating is going to vary from person to person. Either way, there’s enough charm in this game to leave a lasting impression with even a passing glance.
If you want to marvel at how stupid everyone’s name is in this game, pick it up here. But be warned, Colosseum is a Gamecube exclusive as of the time of this writing. So this thing isn’t dropping below triple-digit prices any time soon. I dunno if I can justify the cost of that if you weren’t lucky enough to snag it when it came out, but your money is yours.